No Eye in Gaius
by Serpent Tailed Angel
Summary: You have to be gentle with stones. Trying to get things done too fast only causes trouble. Gaius' eye is proof of that.


_For the record, the title is supposed to be _No Eye in Ga-us_ but the site wouldn't let me do that._

* * *

It took me a moment after I felt something damp on my cheek to realize I was bleeding. I'd been so focused I hadn't even noticed the pain. I have no idea how I'd even blocked it out. Even when I'm completely absorbed with my work I still always notice how hot the forge gets.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I'd already registered what happened, but the rest of me didn't want to believe it. I dropped my hammer-on my foot-and reached up to feel my cheek, checking to confirm that the stuff I got on my hands was red. The whole right side of my face hurt. I couldn't begin to guess where it was coming from. I looked down numbly at the rock beneath my feet, where drops were now falling. The stone that he refused to break no matter how hard I went at it had finally shattered, but with my vision beginning to blur I was afraid I'd fall over if I tried to pick up the ores it had scattered.

A shard of iron fell from my face. At least I knew how I'd been injured.

"Gaius?" I heard someone call. "Gaius!" I knew that voice. Who… ah… I didn't care. Everything just looked like grey smudges now. "Gaius!" Maybe if I weren't in a cave I'd have been able to make out the colors better but… but… I couldn't think straight. Where was I bleeding from?

I reached up again and felt a cavity just above my cheek. Something else was supposed to be there. "Gaius, say something!" I'd lost so much blood that it took me far too long to realize I usually had an eye right there. By then I was too tired to even panic.

Whoever kept yelling caught me when I fell over.

* * *

"Welcome back to the world of the living."

I looked around, dazed, at my surrounding. The pounding headache didn't make it as hard to think as the blood loss had, but it still took me a minute to recognize that I was back in my own bedroom. "How…"

"Hans brought you back," my master told me. "You were lucky that happened before you'd all spread out to far."

Again, it took me a moment to realize he was referring to me hammering a rock so hard it launched a chunk of iron into my eye. "I'd have been luckier if it hadn't happened at all," I told him wearily. I was aware enough now to feel my bandages, wet and sticky on my face. "How bad is it?"

He smiled. "It will take a little while to recover, but you'll be able to see out of it just fine eventually." He only smiled when he was lying. None of the apprentices ever pointed it out to him because he always avoided being honest with us when he thought we wouldn't like what we heard.

"How long?" I felt sick with dread.

"A while," he repeated.

"Months? Years?"

"…years." He decided. "The doctor said it could be several years. He'll be around to fix up that bandage and to sew-ah, some wounds around it." He kept smiling. Were they sewing my eye shut? I was _going _to be sick.

"How bad did it look?"

He just smiled at me.

* * *

"I puked," Hans said. "I don't know how he made the rock fly up like that, but it pulverized his eye. He ripped a lot of the skin beneath it too. I thought I saw bits hanging out and… it was gross. Really gross."

He was just telling the other apprentices the details that our master had lied about, and I'd listened to them talk about one another's mistakes behind their backs too many times to complain, but I wished he wouldn't do it within earshot.

"Will he be able to work anymore?"

"I doubt it. You should have _seen_ how bad it was."

"He'd probably miss every time he'd swing the hammer with just one eye."

"That's freaky. Was it really hanging out?"

"Hush."

There were six apprentices, counting myself, and I was glad that Geldon was trying to quiet the other four.

"He's asleep. Probably from blood loss," Reina argued. "We're not gonna hurt his feeling."

"Then don't wake him," Geldon told her.

"It's his own fault for being reckless," Hans said. "If he wakes up he can listen to us talk about his dumb mistake."

"I'd rather not have to, though," I told them. The room became eerily silent.

"Good night." Geldon finally told everyone. I rolled over in bed to try and get as good a look at them as I could with my remaining eye. It was dark, but none of them looked tired.

I rolled back over and tried to sleep.

* * *

The third bandage turned red more slowly than the first two, maybe because it was then that I finally came to terms with the fact that there was a gap where my eye had been and stopped patting the fabric to confirm that my accident had really happened. When the forth stayed as clean as could reasonably be expected I was taken to the town's doctor. Dwarves don't make the best of doctors, but someone has to do the job, and there's usually at least one person who's moderately good at it.

Our clan's doctor was an elderly man named Sean, who no longer had steady hands. When he made medicine that was no big deal, but it was a huge concern of mine considering he'd be threading a needle through my eye socket.

"Don't look so anxious," Sean said as he laid me down on the bed. The bed that dozens of others had bled all over, or given birth on, on lost control of their stomachs or bowls all over. I hoped Sean wasn't too old to forget to wash the sheets.

"Drink this," he told me, passing me a cup of overly sweet smelling tea. He was the doctor. I swallowed the concoction without hesitation.

"You're sewing it shut, aren't you?" I asked him as he took the empty mug away.

"It's more likely to get infected if I don't. There's no way to fix an eye that isn't there." He shrugged. "Don't worry. You'll sleep through the whole thing."

He was heating the needle over a candle. "Are you sure?" I was sure my panic was fighting back the numbing effects I could feel from the medicine.

"Just relax." He told me. "It will be over before you know it."

* * *

It hurt to wake up. The right half of my face felt burnt, and probably was. The bandages were still present, though there were less now, and I could feel the stitches that had been sewn into my cheek.

For the next few days I was restricted to my bed-restrained if I became too restless. For several weeks following the injury I was given the pleasure of actually watching all my fellow apprentices work past the point I'd been at. It wasn't until Sean felt the wound had healed enough that I didn't have to go around with half my face bandaged up that I was allowed to work again.

My master took me out to go mining. Just looking at all the ore rich stones made my insides seize up.

"If you aren't so impatient with the rock it won't happen again," my master told me. "If you're gentle with the stones, they won't hurt you either."

"It's not a big deal, Gaius," Geldon said. He'd been the most supportive during my recovery, but I hadn't been thrilled that he'd tagged along.

"You're not the one who got maimed."

"It wouldn't have happened if you weren't so reckless."

"When you go back to doing smith work, are you going to be afraid to hammer the iron too?" Geldon asked me. "Listen to what Master says and do it. There's no changing the fact that you lost your eye, but dammit, Gaius, you'd better not lose your will too."

He had a point. I took a deep, shaky breath and raised my hammer.

* * *

I was the last to finish my apprenticeship. Geldon and Terence came back to congratulate me for it, and Master had curry udon made for the farewell party. Even though I'd only been out of commission for a month, I'd ended up a whole year behind, between the rattled nerves and Master's plan to 'reshape me.'

"Like stone," he said, "you need to take your time working with people." I think he made that analogy up for all the times I snapped at him the first few weeks he tried to convince me to be more laid back, less aggressive. It had worked though. My experience had been traumatizing enough to always shut me up the instant it was brought up.

"We should do something to celebrate," Terence decided.

"It's not that big of a deal." The response came out automatically after having been scolded for being too energetic the past year. I was thrilled of course, but after my 'additional training' I couldn't quite see the need to do anything special.

"He's right," Geldon put in. "It doesn't have to be something big, but it should be something. We can get udon."

I'd have gladly settled for that offer, but Terence cut in before I could agree. "We're already getting udon. My cousins into tattooing people right now. Maybe you could get one to cover that scar of your."

I touched the scar beneath my eye, well, where my eye had been. A tattoo didn't sound like that bad of an idea, actually. My eye was already stuck shut. Why not try to decorate it?

* * *

**STA**: Said this somewhere on DA, but I don't think most people follow me both there and here (or at all, actually) so I'll just explain this again. In RF3 there's an event with Gaius where he takes you mining. While gathering ores he starts to use the rocks as an analogy to try and tell you to be patient with people and keep trying, but not to be too rushed or forceful. He also throws out a line implying he keeps his eye shut due to some sort of mining accident where he was too forceful while breaking stones, so I wrote this.


End file.
